iHack Alpha: AI-Enabled Solutions

1. Do I need to pay any money to register for the Hackathon? No. You do not have to pay anything to anyone to register yourself for any Hackathon on HackerEarth.

2. Do I need to have any specific qualifications to be a participant for the Hackathon? If you love to code, you are more than welcome to participate in the Hackathon.

3. How do I submit what I have made for the Hackathon? You have to develop the application on your local system and submit it on HackerEarth as a GitHub or any public repository URL along with a short PPT and/or a video presentation (<5 mins) explaining what you have built. View the submission guidelines for details.

4. Do we need to have the entire idea fully working? The entire idea need not be fully implemented however, the submission should be functional so that it can be reviewed by the judges.

5. How is the environment? Will your environment support any language? Will you provide any IDE and DB for us to work on ideas? You have to develop the entire software application on your local system and submit it on HackerEarth in tar/zip file format along with instructions to run the application and source code. You will also need to submit your GitHub/GitLab repository URL

6. Does one have to be online and available for the entire duration of the Hackathon? No, one does not need to be logged in on HackerEarth or be online for the entire duration. You can develop the application on your local system based on the given themes and then submit it on HackerEarth, on the specific challenge page.

7. Are there any specific technologies mentioned? Are there any restrictions on using a number of pre-built libraries? The use of at least 1 AI Microservice on the Sentient.io platform is mandatory for the hack to be eligible. In addition, you may use open source libraries and other freely available systems / services such as Google Maps, Facebook Connect, Twitter feeds, Twilio etc.

8. Do I need to give a demo for the product that I have built? For teams in the project building phase who are submitting the products they have built, you are required to submit a short video (no more than 5minutes) that demos your submission.

9. A fully developed application need to have a solid backend for data storage like SQL, SharePoint etc. since its online, is it accepted to show only the prototype of it? Yes it's absolutely fine to submit just the prototype. If you use any database like MySQL or PostgresSQL you can also submit a database dump along with your submission. However you are allowed to submit just the prototype.

10. If it is a team submission, does that mean all team members will have access to work at the same time? Yes, all team members can login from their account and do application submission on HackerEarth.

11. Who will own the IP(Intellectual Property) Rights to the product that I have built? The developer/developers of the web/mobile application will have all rights and own the IP of the product. However, all code needs to be in public domain (open source) so that it can be evaluated by the judges.

FAQs from Webinar:

Teams and Community

12. How do I find a team? You can come onto our slack channel, we have activities going on to for you to interact and learn from other participants, and you can form teams together. https://join.slack.com/t/sentientioiha-tzy3224/shared_invite/zt-j8hnnpqd-n3R2Ig7q76R8RB8HJB_FPw#

13. Where is the community forum for discussions? Come on to Slack!

14. What is the deadline for finding teammates? You can continue forming teams until the ideas submissions closes. Anytime before 5th December, 11:55pm SGT, you can form teams and submit your ideas.

15. Can we go solo? Yes, you can. Team sizes are from 1 to 4. However, we do recommend that you form teams to enrich your hackathon experience and learn from others as well.

Submission Related Questions 16. Is there any preferred language (English, Hindi, Filipino, Bahasa, etc)? We try to be as language neutral as possible, however we definitely need a common language that all the judges can understand, as such we request that your submissions are in English.

17. Is there any advantage if we make our own model for predictions? If you have created your own model, please go ahead to use it! We encourage all creativity.

18. Can we use 3rd party APIs? As long as you call one of our AI APIs, you can additionally use your own models, or 3rd party APIs, there are no limitations on those. We are constantly expanding the range of APIs included on our platforms, and we are interested to know what APIs find are useful to you!

19. Do you prioritize socially relevant ideas? Is it ok to come up with business solutions? We have 4 themes, 3 of which are business related and 1 which is socially relevant. You can work on any idea as long as it fits within the theme. You can reach out to us if you are not sure if your idea fits within our theme.

20. Will submissions be judged based on how production ready the project is? For the prototyping phase, yes, that is one of the criteria. However during the ideas submission phase going on now, you are not required to submit any prototype yet.

21. Can projects involve both hardware and software? Yes, it would be very impressive to see how you integrate hardware and software.

22. Do I need to submit a video? Please refer to our submission template. You can fill in the template accordingly on the powerpoint and submit the presentation. You can optionally record a video but it is not compulsory.

23. How to submit idea? Please submit your ideas through the HackerEarth platform. You can see a button when you visit the Hackathon page which will take you to the submission portal.

Sentient.io Platform Related

24. In the API documentation, what is this cURL request that I see? You can call our APIs directly through Command Line with cURL, but most likely you will be using code. You can copy and paste the code snippets we make available for you in popular languages.

25. Will testing the APIs use up credits? 1) Almost all the microservices have a free tier, that will be used up first 2) We have provided you free credits to do your testing (Promo code: iHackAlpha). If that is not enough, let us know and we will arrange something. From past experiences, 5000 credits is more than sufficient!

26. Will credits be deducted while using the demo apps? Using the demo apps will not deduct your credits.